Page 57 - Cloud Essentials

to benefit from an emerging business opportunity. Agility is important. If you

can move faster than your competitors, you can exploit transient market
opportunities before they do. Agility means a shorter time to market, rapid
innovation, increased market share, faster revenue growth, and superior
customer loyalty. The key factor for agility is the time it takes to provision
new hardware and software. Shorter lead times on IT investments increase
the chance that an investment will become profitable before it becomes
obsolete.

Distribution over the Internet

Public cloud services are available from any device anytime from anywhere
in the world where you have an Internet connection. Instead of having to be
in a physical office to access services and data, workers can be anywhere.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) have facilitated this for many years, but
VPNs normally require a hardware investment and IT expertise for
configuration and maintenance.
Data collaboration is easily achieved since data is stored in the cloud.
Cloud storage solutions offer document management, change tracking,
revision history, and so on. This is far superior to emailing files to
colleagues and requesting changes.

Business value can be something positive that has been added, but it can
also be something negative that is reduced. Decision makers are always
concerned with the cost and ongoing maintenance of business assets.
Companies might adopt a cloud computing model for the following
reasons:

Cloud providers have lower cost per server because of their
economies of scale. Virtualization allows multiple cloud customers to

share server hardware by way of virtual machines.
Managing an email system might not be considered a core competence,
and an external provider that focuses on that may achieve a higher
availability. Nobody is good at everything. For example, a graphic sign
design company does not specialize in managing email systems, and

therefore hiring IT staff for this purpose might not make sense.
Server procurement and provisioning consumes time and thus delays
the time to market for important products. The cloud allows rapid

provisioning; a newly needed server can come into existence in
minutes. Without the cloud, it might take days or weeks to determine
the hardware you need, wait for your order to ship, set up the
equipment, install the required software and patches, and so on.

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